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AI sticker shock hits corporate America

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Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#81

Post by piva00 »

gchamonlive wrote: post #36
Arodex wrote: post #9

>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns. We should start to question whether soaring CEO salary spending is delivering meaningful results.

We are since at least the 2000s when the world wide web revolution finally made it possible for Google, Apple, Amazon etc... to become the behemoths they are. And maybe even before that. And the answer is no, because when chief officers succeed it's because of their genius and forward thinking posture, but when they fail it's none of their fault, so they are shielded in an echo chamber that produces such delusions an…

Way before that, as usual we can attribute quite a lot of stupidity in corporate governance to Jack Welch. Execs really bought into Welch's schtick wholly, they went to MBA schools praising Welch's management style, read his books, or at least got taught by people who had bought wholly into it.

So much time has passed that I believe truly the current crop of execs don't know any better, they think this status quo is the only way to manage companies. They aren't really wrong since the incentives are there, and they continue to reap rewards from doing it.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#82

Post by andai »

stego-tech wrote: post #76

The AI fever pitch has done a great job at exposing which companies were run with a degree of sanity, versus who bought blindly into the hype train narrative of worker replacement and went all-in. Look, LLMs thrive when they’re given structured data that’s well annotated, clear direction, and treated as the probabilistic machines they are. Not one of those meshes with the AI narrative of “works on existing stuff, req…

Maybe management is a more reasonable target for human equivalence ;)

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#83

Post by andai »

dylan604 wrote: post #70
lelanthran wrote: post #26

I am Jack's total lack of surprise :-/

How much longer before we get to the “I get cancer. I kill Jack” stage? Isn’t uncontrolled growth a sign of cancer? Or is it more virus like where it just continues to grow without ever reaching a balance with its surroundings?

>declare war on natural ecosystem

>win

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#85

Post by forgotaccount3 »

stockresearcher wrote: post #43

We use GH Copilot at work and this week sat for a presentation by GH about optimizing token usage and maximizing ROI on tokens used. Anyone else get this presentation? They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list… They basically said that everything is too expensive, you have to watch it like a hawk. It was as if they poured a bucket of cold water on…

Interesting. We use Kiro here and looking at the public pricing subscriptions and it's benefit to my workflow, it is clearly a significant productivity increase per dollar spent. And we were told we have a signed a deal that is better than that public pricing. They recently just enabled overages on everyone's account so that people aren't throttled and they are shifting people up/down tiers as required behind the scenes to align with their actual usage.

However when the 'cost' to do something is relatively flat the cost/benefit analysis is going to depend on the value of the person being enabled. Someone making $60k a year using AI to gain a 20% output improvement may not be worth the cost but someone making $160k a year would.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#86

Post by bitexploder »

TSiege wrote: post #53

I really can't tell what is going on with AI these days. I hear AI labs claiming theyre profitable or close to it. I hear companies say they're dubious the juice is worth the squeeze. I've seen anecdotal claims of a measurable increase in productivity of 2x in PRs created and merged coming in at cost 20% of engineering employee budget. Others say they're still getting no value (which I doubt). Simon Willison's recent…

AI Has empowered people to build things much more quickly. Not slop if you are even a little conscientious about how you use it. What it does not do fix the human structural problems. If you are solving the wrong problems you aren’t doing anything useful. Just because you can now take an idea to near completion doesn’t mean it was worth doing, but now you spent tokens and a lot of your mental bandwidth to finish it. Or worse you let it become slop and it will fall apart if you even look at it funny.

Previously if I needed to automate something I thought really carefully about it. Now, I still think really carefully about it. I had fun AI coding some tools I always wanted but they were just pet projects for me. I had fun AI slop coding a couple of things, but it was not good software. But if you have a clear and valuable target? AI can absolutely get you there.

Multiply that across all your colleagues and a lot /seems/ to be happening, but what is actually moving the needle?

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#87

Post by Verdex »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #40
qsort wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you that people are insanely hyped about Claude Code in particular when e.g. Codex isn't far behind (and with recent models I actually prefer it). But I'm going to need a citation for this: > a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI The 3 people on reddit doing this don't even register on a company budget. What seems more…

Codex is actually significantly better than Claude Code now, assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how. Claude's secret sauce is that it'll run off and do stuff that's mostly right without a lot of prompting, but that also makes it willful/disobedient and causes it to be bad for "finishing" work, since it'll circle around your objective in an opinionated way. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/tech…

Hey, would you mind elaborating a bit on this:

> assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how

I mean, if I have a sufficiently clear idea of what and how, then surely just coding it manually would work significantly better. Unless maybe I am a painfully slow typer.

Without some level of "actually I'm not sure exactly" permitted, then I'm not really sure what LLMs bring to the table.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#89

Post by whobre »

Balinares wrote: post #28

Overheard recently: "Thanks to AI we're producing more code and more MRs, faster than ever, but the milestones aren't getting hit any sooner. Actually the opposite, if anything." I wonder how widespread that phenomenon is. Perhaps it's no wonder the prominent actors are trying to rush to IPO...

That's exactly what's happening. Many claim they are more productive with AI, but individual rise in productivity just doesn't translate to projects being completed any sooner.

And by "projects", I mean corporate ones with big teams involved. Hobby projects actually do get finished much faster.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#90

Post by frangonf »

swader999 wrote: post #17

"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees." Like physically, how could this even happen?

Now I understand the rumors of Anthropic starting to get profitable... by ralph looping fortune 500
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